Captain Undervolt and the RX Vega 64s

You may have stumbled across threads on the wild web created by AMD enthusiasts who have been undervolting their Vega cards and are bragging about it. This will seem counter intuitive to overclockers who regularly increase the voltage their GPU will accept in order to increase the frequencies on those cards. There is a method to this madness, and it is not simply that they are looking to save on power bills. Overclockers Club investigates the methods used and the performance effect it has on the Vega 64 in several modern titles in their latest GPU review.

"Across all three games we saw a noticeable drop in power use when undervolting and not limiting the frame rate, or using a high limit. This reduction in power use is important as it improves the efficiency of the RX Vega 64 and it allows increased clock speeds with the reduction of thermal throttling."

Not really hard to figure with undervolting resulting in less power draw/leakage and the GPU able to maintain higher average clock speeds without having the thermal management downclocking as much. Now if you can liquid cool your GPU maybe things will work out better for the average clock speed being maintained when upping the voltage and being able to get rid of the extra heat with little issues when overclocking the GPU.

Coin Miners love that undervolting and the best hashes/Watt metrics and that is probably why there is so much interest in undervolting Vega 64.

Now what will Nvidia be doing with those piles of Pascal DIEs that some of the AIB partners have returned due to the various coin prices tanking.

Nvidia should have not increased production knowing what happened to AMD in the past with regards to coin mining and really Nvidia's GPUs where only selling so much to the miners beause AMD could not/would not produce enough Vega GPUs. Vega was and is still the miners first choice owing to all the extra Vega shader cores compared to Nvidia's Pascal SKUs that are shader sparce compared to AMD's GPU designs.

But GPU prices are sure returning to as close to MSRP as the market will currently allow and that's making the gamers happy, miners too.

The big takeaway though is that AMD typically maxes out their cards in nearly all aspects. So while it has a relatively high frequency, it also has a higher voltage. This is meant to provide more stability than anything else at the cost of heat and power consumption. When undervolting VEGA there is an inherent boost to FPS by 3-5% on average. It was certainly done at first to mitigate the high temperatures and also power draw, however it quickly became a mainstay as to what is recommended to any new VEGA56 or VEGA64 owner as the first thing they should do.

Nvidia has less shader cores and less power used while AMD has more shader cores that use more power, but oh can those Vega GPUs hash for coins. AMD has always had more compute offered on their consumer cards and this time around Vega was constantly sold out with the crazy miners being forced to suck it up and get Nvidia's striped of compute gaming GPU SKUs for mining!

And Nvidia thought that it was becaue the miners actually wanted Nvidia's consumer Pascal for coin mining when, in fact, the miners really wanted Vega and all those shader cores but could not get Vega owing to the supplies not being there and AMD once beuned and twice shy about ever increasing production because of miners.

Now Nvidia sits on a large heap of unsold Pascal GPU DIES and Nvidia should have realised that the only reason the miners wanted Pascal for mining was that Vega was in very short supply and in very high demand because of all those Shader Cores that AMD offers on its consumer GPU variants.

Nvidia was always trying to spin its power savingings for gaming and segementing its "compute" heavy GPU offerings for the Pro Market segement. Vega 56/64 is sure good for non FPS oriented Graphics workloads also even reletive to Nvidia's professional Quadro/Pascal offerings and AMD's Vega GPUs are still in demand for mining for any miner still wants to mine while Nvidia's Pascal offerings are a no sale as long as there are available Vega's for the miners to purchase.

Both AMD and Nvidia are experiencing less demand as crypto-currencies values fall but anyone looking to mine if the prices start to go up again will be getting Vega. I'll bet that there will be folks speculating on Vega's lowest current price points and maybe will be buying up any Vega GPUs that are closest to MSRP with hopes that maybe demand for Vega will return and the prices will go back up again. So some speculators may be buying up Vega when there are bargians to be had and holding onto Vega hoping that the prices will go higher for the ebay market. Nvidia will not be wanted by any coin miners unless the Vega supplies all dry up if there is another cryptocoin boom.

The fact sites are just now picking up on undervolting is sad. Undervolting to OC has been that way since the Fury series. This site as well as many other big name ones did poorly on the overclocking review of these cards.